Interweaving the first comprehensive account of the Palestinian feminist movement with the diary of her experiences as an American Jew living with a Palestinian family in the West Bank, political scientist and human rights activist Philippa Strum tells a dramatic story that virtually all of the international media have ignored. In just five years Palestinian women have not only overcome centuries of isolation, dependence, and repressive gender roles, but they have emerged--and will remain--a key force behind the popular struggle known as the intifada and a significant threat to Israeli control over the occupied territories. Before the onset of the intifada in 1987, most Palestinian women rarely left their homes, and could do so only if escorted by a female relative. They could not divorce their husbands, and if a Palestinian woman was sexually harassed or abused, she was ostracized from the community and could even be killed. Three months after the intifada began, with no recourse to law or redress in the face of the arrests, the beatings, the torture, and the shootings by the Israeli military, Palestinian women took to the streets, holding more than one hundred marches a week. Led by the women's committees that were formed in the late 1970s, they have since gone on to create an entire social and economic infrastructure to end Palestinian reliance on Israel. In their march toward equality, they are enforcing strike days and boycotts of Israeli products, providing underground health care, building agricultural cooperatives and small-scale industries, opening alternative schools, and smuggling food to communities under curfew. The extent to which the massive transformation in the lives ofPalestinian women will endure once independence is achieved remains a question. As long as the occupation lasts, Strum asserts, meaningful reform--whether in gender equality, politics, or economics--will fail to reach fruition in both the occupied territories and Israel. Nevertheless, as she concludes in one of the most gripping accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict written to date, Palestinian women will never return to their traditional status, and they hold out the promise of profound change in the Middle East.

Acknowledgments --Introduction -- West Bank women -- Ramallah -- The women's committees -- Scenes of life under occupation -- Intifada: The first years -- Scenes from the Intifada -- "The Intifada Smile" -- From the committees to the prisons -- Men, women, and families -- Nationalism and feminism -- Women and the economy -- Intifada: The turning point -- The threat of fundamentalism -- Revolution within the revolution -- After the Gulf War -- Conclusion And when the march is over? -- Glossary -- Notes -- Useful background reading -- Index.

Aiso Library Women's History month selection